Ethiopia is experiencing its worst drought in 30 years as the direct result of El Niño.
Photograph: Jonathan Fontaine/SIPA/REX/Shutterstock

Climate scientists have denounced the House committee on science, space and technology after the Republican-held panel promoted a misleading story expressing skepticism that the earth is dangerously warming.

On Thursday afternoon, the committee tweeted a Breitbart article alleging: “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists”. The story linked to a British tabloid, the Daily Mail, which claimed that global land temperatures were plummeting, and that humans were not responsible for years of steadily increasing heat.

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The Daily Mail story cited “Nasa satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere” without specifics, exaggerated the degree of the fall and left out three important points of context: how El Niño systems affect oceans and atmosphere, how ocean temperatures are rising, and the clear upward pattern of year-on-year changes.

“They’re not serious articles,” said Adam Sobel, a Columbia University climate scientist. “They paint it as though it’s an argument between Breitbart and Buzzfeed when it’s an argument between a snarky Breitbart blogger and the entire world’s scientific community, and the overwhelming body of scientific evidence.”

Sobel said the articles “grossly misinterpret” a few accurate details, for instance that El Niño and La Niña systems play a large role in single-year fluctuations. “The temperature goes up for a couple of years and we have the largest year on record, then it goes down and it reaches a level that’s still well above 20th-century historical averages,” he said. “That in no way disproves anything about the causes of the long-term temperature trends.”

Sobel called the committee’s use of Breitbart “distressing”. “If the House science committee wants to understand science they should talk to climate scientists.”

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, noted that 2016 would soon be the hottest year on record, “by a substantial margin” over 2015, which took the record from 2014.

“Three consecutive record-breaking warm years, something we’ve never seen before, and a reminder of the profound and deleterious impact that our profligate burning of fossil fuels is having on the planet,” he told the Guardian.

“For anyone, least of all the House committee on science, to at this particular moment be promoting fake news aimed at fooling the public into thinking otherwise, can only be interpreted as a deliberate effort to distract and fool the public.”

“This is an astounding example of cherry-picking the data,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor at MIT. “Global land temperatures fluctuate significantly from one month to the next, and the article in question appears to have cherry-picked a drop on global land temperatures (not including the ocean, which covers 70% of the globe) for a single month.”

Emanuel left politics to the committee, adding: “You may draw your own conclusions as to motives.”

A spokesperson for the committee did not return emails or phone calls requesting comment about whether anyone vetted the articles. Since 2010, the Republican chairman of the committee, Lamar Smith, has written five op-eds for Breitbart, the far-right website with a record of denying climate change and racist and misogynistic writing. A spokesman for Smith, Nick Cartwright, said “there is not a relationship” between the congressman and the site.

The former chairman of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, was named by president-elect Donald Trump as his “chief strategist” in the Republican’s incoming administration.

Democrats on the committee berated their colleagues for the tweet, with ranking member EB Johnson saying it reflected a longer trend of anti-science action. Republicans, she said, had “attempted to intimidate NOAA’s scientists over climate change research results that they didn’t like, put forth a Nasa bill that gutted Earth science, and continuously attacked any effort on the part of the administration to deal with climate change”.

“This isn’t factual, it’s embarrassing, and Breitbart is not a credible news source,” wrote representative Don Beyer. “We need to bring *science* back to the Science Committee .”

Representative Zoe Lofgren wrote: “Sign these guys up for the flat earth society.”

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Senator Bernie Sanders, who has said he intends to fight Republicans who would dismantle climate change measures, mocked the committee by alluding to the president-elect’s defunct real estate school, which closed and was accused of fraud. “Where’d you get your PhD?” Sanders asked. “Trump University?”

Several leading Republicans on the committee did not reply to requests for comment.

Democrats and Republicans each have their own teams of staffers for the committee, but share a news clipping service for providing information to elected officials. Since their party holds a majority in the House, the Republican team controls the search terms for what news clips are culled, said Kristen Kopshever, a spokeswoman for the Democrats’ office.

“It’s constantly like the the Daily Caller and Texas GOP Vote Blog and just these random conservative publications that have made it into our clips,” she said. Kopshever echoed the representatives, noting that Smith had aggressively pursued investigations: intervening in a fraud case against ExxonMobil and the inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s email server, for instance.

Kopshever said her office tried to rely on apolitical sources, such as Science Magazine and the academic journal Nature, and that she could not speak for her Republican counterparts. “I don’t know what their process is,” she said. “We don’t work a lot together.”